Dan Lauria stars in William Mastrosimone’s drama at Passage Theatre.
By: Stuart Duncan
Twenty years ago, Passage Theatre in Trenton began its hilly career with a mounting of William Mastrosimone’s fine play The Undoing. It was a superb choice for a fledgling company the story of a family that ran a poultry retail shop in Trenton. The intervening years have not been easy for Passage: fundraising has been tough, and the company has received scant help from the city, especially over the use of Mill Hill Playhouse, which the city owns. All of these problems come when a professional theater company attempts to carry on a program in an area where competition is fierce from professional, community and college groups.
But Passage has made it through the 20 years, and what better way to celebrate but with another Mastrosimone play, A Stone Carver. The drama is also set in Trenton, written more than two decades ago, but with a story that easily might have been ripped from newspapers of the past week.
Agostino (played by Dan Lauria, best known for his work on TV’s The Wonder Years) lives by himself. His wife has died and he is estranged from his son, Raff (Jim Iorio), and he resides in a house he has built himself, spending his days carving statues for his church. The town wants to build a new highway off-ramp to keep rush hour traffic moving, and issues eminent domain orders to clear the needed land. But Agostino stubbornly refuses to move, believing that the home he built with his own hands is more important than the "progress" the off-ramp will bring.
As the play opens, Raff and his fiancée, Janice (Elizabeth Rossa in a breath-taking performance), arrive for a final attempt to convince the old man to give up before the wrecking crew arrives. Raff, a rising politician, is expected to try running for mayor in the next election, but to his dad is still a child. The sparks fly between the generations.
Playwright Mastrosimone writes characters like few writers of our time. He clearly has based Agostino on his own father, who faced the threat of eminent domain in 1960. He also has a unique way of engaging strangers in conversation, drawing them out and storing their stories for future use. "I talked to a mason once and he told me, ‘When you put stones in a wall, you’ve got to pick each one up, talk to it and listen to it too. The stone will tell you where it wants to go.’ That had a big effect on my imagination." Quotes such as that are filed away until needed years later.
And so are individual snippets of dialogue. At one point in the one-act play (it runs under two hours, but without intermission), Agostino is left alone with Janice. She is slightly tipsy from the homemade wine (20 percent alcohol), and as she tells him that she is living with his son and how much she loves him, he interrupts: "You don’t start with love you end with love."
It is a lovely evening at Passage, a powerful, heartfelt work, beautifully acted, and directed with obvious love by Robert Kalfin. Nathan Heverin’s set design is just right. And B.H. Barry’s direction of the fisticuffs between father and son is most impressive. A Stone Carver is on its way to an off-Broadway site in New York. See it here, nestled in its own community.
A Stone Carver continues at Mill Hill Playhouse, Front and Montgomery streets, Trenton, through June 18. Performances: Thurs.-Fri. 8 p.m.; Sat. 2, 8 p.m.; Sun. 3 p.m. Tickets cost $25. For information, call (609) 392-0766. On the Web: www.passagetheatre.org

